Sunday, January 3, 2016

Crossover of the Week

September
4, 1935

THE
TIME TRAVELERS’ EX-WIFE

In
Kingsport, the former Alice Peaslee is wished a happy sixtieth
birthday by her son Wingate, who has just returned from an expedition
in Australia with his father. Alice is brought cake and lemonade by
her grandson John, the son of her daughter Hannah and Samuel Beckett.
Looking in a photo album, she sees a picture of herself in London on
June 5, 1931, alongside author Olaf Stapledon and the latter’s
young protégé, the poet Paul Tregardis. Another picture, taken on
September 2, 1924, shows the members of Hannah’s wedding party.
Among them is Hannah’s husband’s supervisor at Brooklyn’s
Museum of Fine Arts, Dr. Halpin Chalmers, a graduate of Miskatonic
University, with whom Alice reminisces about the faculty and Arkham.
Chalmers is friends with a private detective named Charles. Alice
marries Chalmers, and on weekends and holidays they travel to
Partridgeville where he was raised. In 1910, Alice divorces her
husband, Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, having experienced
strange visions of the past and future when she touched him. In 1912,
her son Robert finds the notebooks in which she described her
visions. Robert takes large portions of the text and reorganizes them
into narratives, which Alice rewrites and has published in Whispers
magazine.
The periodical forwards her a letter of praise from a man named
Randolph Carter. Alice spent six years with a distant relative named
Alice the Elder, wandering time and space, having breakfast in
Hyperborea, dancing in Irem, and reading books in Celeano.

Short
story by Pete and Mandy Rawlik in The
Lovecraft eZine
#29, Mike Davis, ed., February 2014. Kingsport, Miskatonic
University, Arkham, and Randolph Carter appear in a number of H. P.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories. Alice Peaslee; her husband,
Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee; and their children, Wingate,
Hannah and Robert, are from Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time.”
Irem is from Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City.” The magazine
Whispers
appears
in Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable”; it is believed by many
Lovecraft scholars the Carter that narrates that story is Randolph
Carter. John Beckett is the father of time traveler Sam Beckett on
the television series Quantum
Leap.
Paul Tregardis is from Clark Ashton Smith’s story “Ubbo-Sathla.”
Hyperborea appears in “Ubbo-Sathla” and many other works by
Smith. Dr. Halpin Chalmers and Partridgeville are from Frank Belknap
Long’s story “The Hounds of Tindalos.” Chalmers’ private
detective friend is Nick Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s The
Thin Man.
Celeano (or Celaeno) is mentioned in several Mythos stories by August
Derleth.

Besides this story and the episode with the Tales of the Gold Monkey connection, Stallions Gate, New Mexico, the fictional site of the project in the show, is mentioned in two of Edward M. Erdelac's Merkabah Rider tales, including the novel Once Upon a Time in the Weird West, which I covered in a previous post.